“Ultralight” is Ethan Janais debut solo album, returning his music to the synthesizer as its main source of inspiration. Ultralight is short, sweet, and unwavering in it’s harmonically rich atmospherics. Stacking chords on top of chords, alongside propelling beats and lyrical mysticism, the album features three vocal pieces and three instrumentals that swoop and change in the blink of an eye, and return to familiar themes.

The album formed itself differently from my previous work and collaborations – it was born from a very isolated state, and was begging to have synthesizers and ambience as the main feature. With age, one can get extremely scrupulous about what is worth pursuing musically. Ultralight pushed me to unclutter a lot of my previous notions of what I was wanting to do musically. ~ Ethan Janais

In the year 2000, Ethan created the “Echo Us” project. Echo Us albums played front-to-back as interconnected works, and were often conceptual in nature. Inspired by metaphysical and spiritualist phenomena such as The Seth Material by Jane Roberts, the music often came in waves, using automatic writing for its lyrics and conceptualization.

Now spanning over two decades, Ethan’s musical output has covered everything from rock, folk & Celtic music, to other world musics and classical. However, his first love is electronic music of all varieties.

In 2024 Ethan embarked on his first eponymous solo outing, Ultralight, stripping down his arrangements and creating more space for complex harmonic structures and ambience. Ultralight is a categorically-challenging album, comprising Ethan’s work in both analog and digital synthesis, with a vocal side of three songs, and a b-side of three instrumentals.

Tracklist:

 lp:

1.ultralight
2.what i am 2 u
3.my sparrows
4.white paper elephant
5.parity
6.parisol

cd/digital:

1.ultralight
2.what i am 2 u
3.white paper elephant
4.parity
5.my sparrows
6.parisol

A music video and single for the title track, Ultralight dropped Thursday, September 19th. The full-length Ultralight album will be available Thursday, October 3rd 2024 Digitally, and Nov 3rd 2024 on physical formats.